Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the no. 3 official at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, haven’t yet publicly resigned. That’s a contrast to many other Bush administration officials who are using the natural break between presidential terms to head for the exits.

One hears all kinds of talk in Washington about why this is so. One story line is that they will stay put, but only until after the Iraqi elections at the end of next month. Our sense is that the three would like to stay with President Bush through his full second term, but that they haven’t received a clear signal from Mr. Bush that he’d like them to. Mr. Bush would do his loyal staff and the country an important service by letting Messrs. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith know that he’d like them to stay – and by explaining why to the public and the troops.

It’s not as if there isn’t a mob calling for the ouster of Mr. Rumsfeld and his inner circle. Senator Kerry, Howard Dean, Vice President Gore, and The New York Times have all publicly called for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation or firing. Even some voices on the right have joined in.The Weekly Standard called on Messrs. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to resign back in July 2001, and after the news of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations called for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster.

Most of those who want Messrs. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith gone, though, are the ones who wanted Mr. Bush gone. The reasons Mr. Bush could give for hanging on to the Pentagon team are the same reasons a lot of voters had when they went to the polls to re-hire Mr. Bush for four years: a tremendous pair of successes in strategy and in execution.

In terms of strategy, it is the Pentagon civilian leadership that, apart from Mr. Bush, is most publicly and thoroughly identified with Mr. Bush’s idea of making America safer by spreading freedom and democracy to the countries of the Middle East whose tyrannies have been spawning Islamic extremist terrorism. It’s an idea that Mr. Bush spent a lot of time explaining in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention and elsewhere on the campaign trail.

In terms of execution, it is the Pentagon civilian leadership that, along with Mr. Bush, deserves much of the credit for the fact that, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, there has not been another terrorist attack of that scale on American soil. This is a near-miraculous success, and no one should take it for granted that it will continue. It amounts to a tremendous achievement in the face of a deadly and determined enemy.

On those merits alone, Messrs. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith deserve to stay. But there are more achievements: The capture of Saddam Hussein and of Al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The swift achievement of regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the predictions of quagmires by armchair generals and the press. All of this without a draft, without massive increases in the military budgets, and with levels of American casualties that, while each is painful, are small by comparison to past wars.

Meanwhile, the transformations in technology and personnel management that the Rumsfeld team is making at the Pentagon will mean a stronger American military for years to come. Mr. Rumsfeld championed legislation that will allow him to fill with civilians many support jobs now held by soldiers, as he puts it, “returning those needed military billets to the war-fighting force.” He is realigning forces from Cold War bases in Europe and South Korea to places where they can be deployed more readily to new trouble spots.

To the extent that there have been some missteps along the way – and if America has in its history levied a war without missteps, we aren’t aware of it – many of them are the results of failings at Central Intelligence Agency and at the State Department, rather than at the Pentagon. It was the CIA, not the Pentagon, that was primarily in charge of the botched postwar search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And it was the State Department and the CIA that combined to scuttle Ahmad Chalabi’s prewar efforts for better postwar planning in Iraq.

None of this is to argue that Messrs. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith are perfect. But they are doing a job of which Mr. Bush, our GIs, and all Americans can be proud. Messrs. Feith and Wolfowitz are doing so in the face of a worldwide anti-Semitic smear campaign in which the enemy portrays them as pawns of Israel’s Likud Party, a charge all too rarely answered by American leftists and liberals who know better. No person is irreplaceable in public life, but it is hard to see the logic of Mr. Bush replacing this team in the middle of the war.